Minister: Pst. Laide Olaniyan
Topic: Understanding the Sense of the Milk of the Word Pt. 2
(Neh 8:8) “So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.”
There is a sense that God instills in a soul in every dispensation, and it differs from a general understanding. The reason and the use of our sense organs in the natural trains us, for example, to identify certain things and be able to respond to them. A living thing responds to stimuli through the sense organ, and it can pick up things uniquely and then respond to them for either its life or growth in its environment. Our ears are not the sense in itself. It is the organ that picks up something about sound. It can hear but not be able to discern very well. The best of our eyes is still limited as it can only see the visible color spectrum. Even with our feelings of touch, some of us cannot distinguish properly between fabrics. But experts can feel and differentiate varieties of things because, by reason of use, they have exercised their senses to pick and identify particular things.
There is a sense that particular allocations of God give. It is not until we start using strong meat that we start exercising our senses. Our senses are exercised in every allocation.
In milk, for instance, the things used to exercise the converts’ senses were the Apostles’ doctrine (i.e., teaching of the word), fellowship (i.e., communion with the Lord and with the brethren), breaking of bread, and prayers. The brethren were said to continue steadfastly in these things. Without steadfast continuance in these things, a particular sense of the brethren would have been dull. Many of the things the early church did were not out of compulsion or coercion. Everyone had a sense of responsibility as a result of their senses being trained.
If a person is continuing in the Word but is not given to prayer, there will be an imbalance. If we are exercised in certain things and there is no exercise in other parts, there is a way it will show in our walk and in our conversation. Every person who is thoroughly exercised in the milk appears as unto spiritual. If we don’t have the scriptural judgment, it is possible to conclude that the person is spiritual because their life looks almost like Christ. A person who is well exercised with milk will be as unto spiritual (1 Cor 3:1-2).
Part of the fruit that we see that was used through the milk is a fruit of faith born of the Holy Ghost, characterized by the wisdom of the spirit. It is a fruit of faith that shows interest in that which is spiritual, not just supernatural. We see in the early church era that they also weren’t encouraging young converts to go and do the miraculous. Miracles were done by the apostles (Acts 5:12). They were more concerned about growing up and bearing fruit than doing spectacular or supernatural things. That doesn’t mean they were told that the supernatural was invalid. They were seeing it, but that was not what they were driving them towards, nor was it the object of their faith. Simon the sorcerer was the first to desire the gift, and he was rebuked because his heart was not right. They were more careful about heart posture/what the heart was seeking than about what they were able to do.
(Acts 2:42-45) Forbearance was also wrought in them to a great measure. With milk, many people who were not residents of Jerusalem were willing to relocate without going back to their jobs, lands, animals, etc., and they were satisfied with it. The only anchor they had was that the promise of the giving of the Holy Ghost (on the day of Pentecost) was the promise to the fathers (Acts 2:14-16). They sacrificed natural possessions and had all things in common. They were content to abide by the light of the milk, not to be unique or stand out, even with their giving. There was no sense of specialty. Selling their possessions to give was not cajoling; it was a sense that was instilled in them by exercise.
(Acts 2:46) Singleness of heart was a kind of unity milk produced. The virtues the Lord works in the souls are in levels and degrees. Everything was expressed in faith and love, but in different degrees, as every faith has its love expression. There was a way they had love towards all the saints by having the care of the saints in everybody’s heart. As long as one of them was a believer, they took them in as being in the same family. We must not be alienated from the sufferings of our brethren. We are members of the same body. If there is proper milk, the church in the North cannot be suffering, and we are not feeling it. We tend to see many missionaries in the North. It is born out of love for saints. These are missionaries who are bothered about the health of the church in the natural. The Gentile church, in the early church era, was told not to forget the church in Jerusalem to minister carnally to them. (Romans 15:25-26) That discipline of communicating to brethren in need, brethren who lack naturally, is actually a discipline that comes with milk because we are members of the same family.
The singleness of heart, referred to above, is not purity of heart yet, but it worked to streamline the heart towards one thing. It exercised their hearts. Naturally, when a soul prospers in this allocation, he should seamlessly move to the next, being guarded by the prayers and intercessions of his forebearers so that Satan doesn’t interrupt that journey. That journey should naturally cascade into the Christ allocation or the sighting of it. The heart cannot be single without the eyes being single. (Luke 11: 34) Eyes here refer to the eyes of the heart. The same way, the eyes have to be evil for the heart to be hardened. This singleness is showing us that from the milk allocation, they are preparing to touch (address/judge) our darkness. In the milk, they don’t really touch our darkness, but they prepare the soul for that operation.
Up until this time, the issue of the person of Christ is still a mystery. We can know the name, but Christ, as an allocation or a spiritual person, is still obscure and is not the hope of the soul. It is not yet a nature or goal that we seek to come into. The exercise of the dispensation of meat or Christ is to show us the person whom we believed and by whom we believed, is actually a person. Not just a human being, but to show us that the new man is a person that the soul should become.
They have to show us Christ and Christ’s life for it to be written on the soul. That is where many get offended. Some of those who have sacrificed their possessions before now see that their expectation and concept of the kingdom was that after giving their possessions, they would be able to rule later. But when they begin to show us Christ, we see that He is a suffering saviour. Showing us Christ truly can be an offense to us. Christ is not the dream of the carnal soul. A person can abstain from the works of the flesh in the hope of a natural estate. But when the life of Christ is shown to them, it becomes offensive, and they no longer see the essence.
(1 Cor 15: 19) The hope that Christ shows us is a hope beyond this world. But for a natural man, all his hope is for the here and now. We would be exercised in faith, hope, and charity through the gospel of Christ, for there is the man that we will become at the end of the day. At the end of the exercise, we become men of peace. A man of peace is a man who has no problem with anything God designs his life to be like. Christ teaches us to be content with any state we find ourselves in the natural and not seek a higher calling than that.
Some people wonder why we were not taken to heaven after being born again, but we see that Jesus left us here because he knows that the work is not finished yet. After the church has been raised by the Apostles’ doctrine to a point, Christ now comes as a teacher through the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost manifests as the spirit of Christ through the fivefold. The fivefold enter into another operation as priests, where they can now continue the ministry of Christ in the church. They partner with Christ in ministering to His church (Eph 4:11-13). Christ becomes a teacher, and then we are taught to put off the old man and put on the new man. We are now taught that the new man we have become in our spirit must now be one with our soul until our soul becomes a new man. The new man that we are becoming is Christ, the new man. Becoming Christ here is not Christ as the anointed one; it is becoming him as a person, a man, a stature, or a work in the soul. It is becoming a measure of a man who is susceptible, agreeable, malleable with God.
Man, by design, doesn’t know God, who God is. We have our perception of what God is, and it is governed by the mind of the Gentiles. Every god that man has had is a god that can do things. People worship these gods so they won’t be in the bad book of those gods, and so they will be favorably disposed towards them. They just want a god they can use to sustain their lives here. When we talk also about God, it is in that light that we see God. We now have one God who can do many things for us. The concept of God and how we judge Him faithful is that He does all of those things. Many times, that mind is not necessarily taken away with the milk allocation, even when we are sacrificing.
Christ’s allocation now makes us more interested in His person that is being formed in us. We are shown Christ as an inheritance. We received the Holy Ghost as a gift initially. Then, we receive Him later as a token of our inheritance. We initially don’t receive or see the Holy Ghost as a tutor or bringer of salvation until they begin to deal with us as unto the spiritual. We must start seeing the person of Christ as the goal, as the inheritance, not just copying what he does.
The Christ allocation isolates everything and begins to show us Christ alone. That is where our contentment is put to the test. The test is that we should be able to hold Christ without anything else because in Him is the fullness of satisfaction. That even if God doesn’t give us anything apart from Christ, we should be okay. Many of the commandments given to us in Christ are about training our hearts to be content with what Christ is. (1 Cor 6:1-8) There is a frame in us that is not content with the judgment in Christ. We usually feel that to deny us the things we need naturally is to make us a fool or make us lose the work of our hands. That material thing is more real to us than Christ and the life that is in him. The Faith of the Son is showing how Jesus saw a life or a person that is in God, which is ruled by a set of laws and commandments. Jesus began to obey those commandments, and he became content with that person and embodied that person. Until He became The Christ.
The Faith of the Son is our response to a body of commandments that embodies the essence of the life that Christ is from righteousness to righteousness or from faith to faith. The Faith of the Son uses faith to acquire the nature revealed that is in Christ, and then the nature that is in the living God. Christ comes to the church as a teacher to teach truth. The exercise used by Christ is the truth that is in him (Eph 4:20-24) (1 Pet 1:22). He doesn’t just teach; he exercises us to obey. In milk, the exercise is apostle’s doctrine, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayers. That foundation is also not removed in Christ.
There is a body of truth that is in Christ. Every profession has its own body of knowledge and ethics. However, He doesn’t only come as a teacher, but He also supervises the embodying of the life. We are not changed/altered by only learning. We must hear and be taught, and then, in teaching, we are given what we must do, and he supervises us as we do it.
(1 Pet 1:22) Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently: It is in obeying the truth that we have been taught that purifying comes. The truth that Christ comes to exercise us in has its knowledge, its life, and its laws that must be obeyed. By hearing and saying the knowledge of the truth, we can think we’ve embodied the truth. But only by obeying the knowledge are we changed by it. (Eph 4:20-24) The truth inside of Jesus summarizes that we put off the old man. The truth shows that the old man and former conversation are still within us. The fact that we are recreated in our spirit doesn’t mean that the old man is not there again. Former conversation doesn’t mean it is already past tense for us. That it is a former conversation means it is not native to our newly created spirit because our spirit is Christ. But our soul is still of the former conversation. There are things the Lord expects us to remove from our souls that we are not even aware of. Jesus Christ is the one who will reveal it. Jesus is the embodiment of grace and truth (Jhn 1:14). The truth in Jesus is not just accurate facts. It is to show us what Satan has done wrong in man and show man what is correct. (Eph 4:22-24) 22 That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; 23 And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; 24 And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.
At the end of the exercise of Christ, a corrupt man should be gone, and a corruptible man should remain. The old man is corrupt. Christ is corruptible, but he is not corrupt. There is truth that washes away corruption. (2 Pet 1:3-4). 3 According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: 4 Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. Christ is the economy that makes a man escape corruption. A man who is born again still has corruption in his soul, even though he looks spiritual. Those corruptions are lust in the flesh and lust of men. There are categories of lust: youthful lust, fleshly lust, filthiness in the flesh, and filthiness in the spirit. They are different shades of affection; they are our preferences. They don’t look like sins, but they are the way we love our life to run; the kind of person we would like to marry, the kind of place we would like to stay, the kind of food we would love to eat, etc. They are our loves and what we love to see. Some of them do not look evil and are sometimes even given by the Lord. But when Christ is being revealed, they begin to put a knife to it.
Every man’s affection and corresponding point of death when Christ comes differ. Sometimes, God uses our parents in the natural to detach some affections from us through discipline. They are saving us through those disciplines. The issue with those affections is the premium the soul has placed on them. God doesn’t want our souls to lean on anything in the natural. Sometimes, we don’t know that our soul has built defenses, preferences, and made choices. God wants to crumble those oppositions. He searches the heart. He tries the reins. He wants to be sure that we are content with Christ. We have lifted our souls to many vanities that constitute corruption. We don’t see them as defilement, but they are filth in the Lord’s eyes. We may not have works of the flesh, but have fleshly affections. If we walk in the spirit, we will not fulfill some works of the flesh. But to be free from affections of the flesh, we need to be exposed to the truth of Christ.
(Rom 1:16-17) When we are being shown what righteousness is, we will be able to see that some of the affections and desires of the mind are evil. In milk, we can ask for some things on the basis that God said He will grant us the desires of our heart. But the truth of Christ will let us know that those desires are corrupt. We will be brought to a place where we know that there’s nothing we bring from ourselves that is innocent (Romans 7:18). When we are being exercised with Christ, we will know that there’s nothing that is coming from us that is right. We won’t trust ourselves. This has nothing to do with an inferiority complex. It is the wisdom of the spirit that comes with age that separates a man from his own ways and causes a man to lean on God and his wisdom. Christ is more than being kind to our neighbor. It is that our default nature is kindness as a result of the man who has been worked inside. Charity “is” not “does” (1 Cor 13).
When a soul is exercised by word, knowledge, and leading and subjection in the part of obedience, that soul acquires a nature that is comfortable or at peace with God. One of the hallmarks is that the soul doesn’t have the strength to resist God. Through the exercise of the truth of Christ, there is a purification/alteration/change that comes to us. Also, there is a sense that the man that is formed in us begins to have. All he is looking for is the will of God. When a man has gotten there, it doesn’t mean they have removed all the darkness, but he has been exercised to an extent; then they begin to move him into the zone of everlasting life. A soul that has become content as a result of exercise. He has grown not to trust himself. He is afraid. He doesn’t want to go outside of the pleasure of the Father. He is meek, courteous, and contrite. Whatever the Lord says, it might not be his choice, but he flows with it once he has a witness and counsel within him because he wants to be right.
MESSAGE ENDS.